Antiwar movement awakens over Iraq

Many, like Marie-Louise Jackson-Miller of Quincy, Mass., marched with other members of their families. "Our whole family is united for peace," she said, as she walked alongside her mother and two daughters. It was wonderful being with so many like-minded people. This march gave me a whole lot of hope."

"I don't believe that the UN, France, Russia, and Germany are going to be able to stop the rush to war. I really think the only thing standing between a war and not having a war is a mass movement. It has to be calculated into the plans of the warmakers" said Deirdre Sinnott, an activist with International Answer, one of the demonstration's organizers.

For most of the New York demonstrators, however, war seemed almost a foregone conclusion, and in London, few expected the government to change its mind either.

Though the success of the London march "has obviously consolidated opposition" to Mr. Blair within his ruling Labour party, "his position would only be at risk if the war went very badly," says Wyn Grant, a professor at Warwick University.

As the demonstrators massed in Hyde Park, Blair told a Labour Party conference in Glasgow that they were showing "a right and entirely understandable hatred of war. "It is a moral purpose and I respect that," Blair added. "But the moral case against war has a moral answer; It is the moral case for removing Saddam. If there are 500,000 on that march that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for. If there are one million, that is still less than the number of people who died in the wars he started."

That call for regime change in Iraq - the first by a European leader - moved Blair even further away from his EU counterparts, who were meeting in Brussels Monday in an effort to paper over the cracks in their positions on a war and salvage their dream of a common foreign policy.

That goal receded further into the distance earlier this month, when eight current and prospective European Union countries came out openly in support of Washington, rebuffing French and German aspirations to speak for Europe as a whole.

Hundreds of thousands of people in cities around the world protested over the weekend against military action against Iraq.

General crowd estimates

Rome: 1 million

London: 750,000

Madrid: 660,000

Berlin: 300,000-500,000

Paris: 100,000

Dublin, Ireland: 80,000

Amsterdam: 70,000

Oslo: 60,000

Seville, Spain: 60,000

Brussels: 50,000

Bern, Switzerland: 40,000

Stockholm: 35,000

Glasgow, Scotland: 30,000

Copenhagen, Denmark: 25,000

Montreal: 20,000

Toronto: 15,000

Vienna: 15,000

Toulouse, France: 10,000

Cape Town, South Africa: 5,000

Tokyo: 5,000

Johannesburg, South Africa: 4,000

Dhaka, Bangladesh: 2,000

Kiev, Ukraine: 2,000

Tel Aviv: 2,000

SOURCE: Associated Press

• Material from Mark Rice-Oxley in London, Stacy Vanek Smith and Steven Savides in New York, and the Associated Press was used in this report.

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